How Good Are Fast and Frugal Heuristics?

Abstract

Rationality and optimality are the guiding concepts of the probabilistic approach to cognition, but they are not the only reasonable guiding concepts. Two concepts from the other end of the spectrum, simplicity and frugality, have also inspired models of cognition. These fast and frugal models are justified by their psychological plausibility and adaptedness to natural environments. For example, the real world provides only scarce information, the real world forces us to rush when gathering and processing information, and the real world does not cut itself up into variables whose errors are conveniently independently normally distributed, as many optimal models assume.